• Palestinians have to queue for hours to fetch water
• 20 killed as truck overturns on a crowd of aid seekers
GAZA: Weakened by hunger, many Gazans trek across a ruined landscape each day to haul all their drinking and washing water — a painful load that is still far below the levels needed to keep people healthy.
Even as global attention has turned to starvation in Gaza, where after 22 months of a devastating Israeli military campaign a global hunger monitor says a famine scenario is unfolding, the water crisis is just as severe according to aid groups.
Though some water comes from small desalination units run by aid agencies, most is drawn from wells in a brackish aquifer that has been further polluted by sewage and chemicals seeping through the rubble, spreading diarrhoea and hepatitis.
Most water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed and pumps from the aquifer often rely on electricity from small generators — for which fuel is rarely available.
Moaz Mukhaimar, aged 23 and a university student before the war, said he has to walk about a kilometre, queuing for two hours, to fetch water. He often goes three times a day, dragging it back to the family tent over bumpy ground on a small metal handcart.
“How long will we have to stay like this?” he asked, pulling two larger canisters of very brackish water to use for cleaning and two smaller ones of cleaner water to drink.
His mother, Umm Moaz, 53, said the water he collects is needed for the extended family of 20 people living in their small group of tents in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. “The children keep coming and going and it is hot. They keep wanting to drink. Who knows if tomorrow we will be able to fill up again,” she said.
Their struggle for water is replicated across the tiny, crowded territory where nearly everybody is living in temporary shelters or tents without sewage or hygiene facilities and not enough water to drink, cook and wash as disease spreads.
Queues for water
“Water scarcity is definitely increasing very much each day and people are basically rationing between either they want to use water for drinking or they want to use a lot for hygiene,” said Danish Malik, a global water and sanitation official for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Merely queuing for water and carrying it now accounts for hours each day for many Gazans, often involving jostling with others for a place in the queue. Scuffles have sometimes broken out, Gazans say.
Collecting water is often the job of children as their parents seek out food or other necessities.
“The children have lost their childhood and become carriers of plastic containers, running behind water vehicles or going far into remote areas to fill them for their families,” said Munther Salem, water resources head at the Gaza Water and Environment Quality Authority.
With water so hard to get, many people living near the beach wash in the sea.
New pipeline
A new water pipeline funded by the United Arab Emirates is planned, to serve 600,000 people in southern Gaza from a desalination plant in Egypt. But it could take several more weeks to be connected.
Much more is needed, aid agencies say. Unicef spokesperson James Elder said the long-term deprivations were becoming deadly. “Starvation and dehydration are no longer side effects of this conflict. They are very much frontline effects.”
20 aid seekers killed
Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Wednesday that 20 people were killed when an aid truck overturned on a crowd of aid seekers in the central Gaza Strip.
“Twenty people were killed and dozens injured around midnight last night in a truck carrying aid overturned… while hundreds of civilians were waiting for aid,” the agency’s spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
The incident took place near the Nuseirat refugee camp, as the truck was driving on an unsafe road that Israel had previously bombed, Bassal added.
Hamas accused Israel of forcing truck drivers to take dangerous routes to reach aid distribution centres, and to “intentionally engineer… starvation and chaos.”
Israel “forces drivers to navigate routes overcrowded with starving civilians who have been waiting for weeks for the most basic necessities,” Hamas’s media office said in a statement. “This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks,” it added.
Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2025
